


Bond Girl

by cptsdcarlosdevil



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Awkwardness, Crushes, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 19:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5977749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cptsdcarlosdevil/pseuds/cptsdcarlosdevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy Lewis has a crush on the beautiful red-haired barista at her local coffeeshop, whom she's pretty sure is a spy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bond Girl

“I’m going to die,” Darcy announced. 

“Calculus is not that difficult,” Jane said, “I’m sure you’ll get it.”

Darcy’s mother had wanted her to get an internship that summer to get some ‘real work experience’. Darcy had applied to a physics internship, expecting that her math background (a solid C in precalculus) and her science background (Physics for Poets) would be more than enough to ensure that she would instead spend the summer in Cancun, sipping mimosas and making eyes at the cabana boys. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Erik Selvig wasn’t particularly well-regarded among other physicists. (How was Darcy supposed to know that? He had “doctor” in front of his name.) They hadn’t had any other applicants. And once Jane Foster had found out exactly how little Darcy knew, instead of having eight hours a day of helping with physics experiments, she had eight hours a day of helping with physics experiments and four hours a day of coffeehouse calculus cram school. Apparently Jane thought it “helped keep her in practice” for “teaching undergraduates”. 

Darcy hated her mother. 

“I’m not going to die about calculus, for once,” Darcy said. “Look over there.”

Jane tilted her head. “The… specials board?”

“No,” Darcy said. “The barista!”

“The… guy in the Archers Do It With A Quiver shirt?”

“No!” Darcy said. “The other barista.”

The barista in question had wavy chin-length red hair, a perfect nose, leather pants, and a black shirt that did nothing to hide the utter perfection of her rack-- and Darcy knew about perfect racks, being in possession of one herself. She frowned a lot, but Darcy was certain that this was only because her smile would summon angels and make puppies cry and cause ice cream to spontaneously appear in the hands of anyone who looked at her. She was in love. 

And she didn’t even know the woman’s name.

“Okay,” Jane said. “Now, as I was saying, given f(x)=x3−2x2, how do we find the rule for--”

“How can you think about differential calculus at a time like this?” Darcy asked. “My future wife is over there pouring an Americano.”

Jane’s expression suggested that Darcy had invented the crush for the sole purpose of getting out of doing calculus which, to be fair, was something Darcy would do. “Do you know her name?”

“No,” Darcy said, “which makes it a lot harder to write Mrs. Darcy X on all my notebooks, let me tell you.” Darcy sighed. “Anyway, I don’t want to be a Bond Girl.”

“What?” Jane said. 

“She’s obviously a spy,” Darcy said. “Look at her. Look at that ass.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s a spy,” Jane said. 

“You don’t get that awesome of an ass through genetics,” Darcy said. “You have to work out for it. She does squats. She does heavy squats. That woman has never skipped leg day.” 

“She could just work out,” Jane said.

“Who works out of their own free will?” Darcy asked. “No, mark my words, she’s a spy, and she has to stay in shape for fighting terrorists. Which is why I won’t date her. You know what happens to the Bond girl?”

Jane hazarded a guess. “She… dates Bond at the end of the movie?” 

“She dies!” Darcy said. “Or she turns out to be a villain. Or most terrifying of all, she just disappears. She’s fine and healthy at the end of the movie and then by the time the next one comes along she’s gone, never to be seen or heard from again.” Darcy shook her head. 

“James Bond is fiction,” Jane said. 

“Shows how much you know,” Darcy said. “They’re just trying to get us off the scent.”

Jane considered arguing with this, then seemed to conclude that they were here to study math, not to argue about Darcy’s obviously correct opinions about who is secretly a spy. “To find the rule for f’(x), we--”

It wasn’t that Darcy had never seen the barista before. In fact, her shifts happened to coincide perfectly with Darcy’s Hellacious Journey Into Higher Math. Sometimes the only thing that could drag her into the coffeeshop was the promise of hot, steaming caffeine brought to her by a hot big-boobed redhead who, to be clear, never smiled, but whose smile broke Darcy’s heart in two anyway. Darcy had had weeks upon weeks of L’Hopital’s rule to spend nursing her crush until it was so large it was more like a splat. 

But the barista had never before worn leather pants. Darcy did not know how she was supposed to survive this. 

“Darcy, are you paying any attention whatsoever?” Jane asked. 

“Um,” Darcy said. “No?”

Jane put the books aside for a moment. “Why don’t you just ask her out?” she said. “Then you can stop being distracted and we can get back to studying.”

“I don’t think the prospect of a date with the hottest chick I’ve ever seen in my life is going to make me pay more attention to studying,” Darcy said. 

“No,” Jane said, “but you’re distracted enough now that I’m willing to do anything to change it.” She smiled. “Come on, it’s not that hard. All you have to do is tell her she’s cute and you’d like to see her after the shift.”

“It’s true,” Darcy said, “after I’m crushingly rejected I’m going to throw myself into mathematics as the only possible way to comfort myself in my grief.”

Jane looked so hopeful. “Really?”

“No.”

It was all very well for Jane. Jane had a very large Norwegian golden retriever of a boyfriend named, of all things, Thor. He liked Pop Tarts and could probably bench press cars and was hopelessly devoted to and in awe of Jane, because of her mystical ability to understand things like gravitons. Darcy would also be in awe of Jane’s ability to understand gravitons if she didn’t keep trying to share it with Darcy. 

Anyway, Jane had her romantic life sorted out, as long as she didn’t lose the ability to understand how gravity worked. That didn’t apply to normal humans like Darcy, who didn’t understand how gravity worked in the first place, and even if they did were unlikely to parlay this ability into a smoking hot boyfriend named after a Norse god. They had to deal with romance in the normal human way, that is, drowning their anxiety in cupcakes. 

“I don’t even know if she likes girls,” Darcy said. 

“You don’t need to know if she likes girls to ask her out,” Jane said. “All you need is to believe in yourself. Let other people reject you, don’t reject yourself for them.”

“Says the girl who has a boyfriend,” Darcy said. 

“Um, yes,” Jane said, “that’s how I got a boyfriend in the first place. Did you know that Thor was in love with me for two years before we started dating?”

“No,” Darcy said. 

“He didn’t ask me out because he felt kind of stupid compared to me,” Jane said. “He couldn’t imagine why I’d want to date him when I could date another physicist. But I recognized his kindness and his good heart, which are both much more important to me than whether someone understands string theory. “

“You recognized his abs,” Darcy said sourly. 

Jane-- and this was actually true, Darcy wasn’t making it up-- Jane actually giggled. “Yeah,” she said. “I did.” 

“Not everyone has a weirdo boyfriend who thinks being good at physics is the most important part of attractiveness,” Darcy said. 

“The point is that we’ve been happily dating for three years, and we could have started dating much sooner if he hadn’t assumed that I was out of his league,” Jane said.

“You could have asked him out,” Darcy said. 

“I did,” Jane said. “As soon as I stuck my nose out of my books long enough to realize that he was there, male, and very attractive. Which was a long time. You shouldn’t count on physicists to be able to figure out anything about human interaction quickly.” 

“She’s not a physicist,” Darcy said. 

“You don’t know her name,” Jane said, “how could you possibly know whether she’s a physicist or not?”

“She’s wearing leather pants,” Darcy said. “How many physicists wear leather?”

Jane giggled again. Darcy was gaining a whole world of horrifying new insights into her boss’s personality. “Well, actually, me and Thor--”

“Ew!” Darcy said. “I did not need to know that, I am going to need to pour bleach into my brain to get the mental images out.”

“Well,” Jane said, “if you don’t pay more attention to your tutoring, I’m going to tell you all about what Thor and I do with carrots.”

“That’s a violation of the Geneva Conventions,” Darcy said. 

“And as a non-state actor, I lack legal capability to be party to the Geneva Conventions,” Jane said, “which you should know, being a political scientist. Now, how do you think we solve this problem?”

“Uh,” Darcy said, “limits?”

“Are you just saying that because it’s the one calculus concept you’ve heard of?” Jane asked. 

“Yes.”

Jane was a harsh taskmaster, but it was actually true that focusing on math made it a lot harder to focus on the way that the barista’s ass looked in those pants. Jesus Christ. It was like they were painted on. 

Darcy had even earned a smile from Jane for getting a question right the first time-- for once-- when she realized that she was inadequately caffeinated. “How about a five-minute break,” Darcy said, “while I wait for my cappuccino.”

“Sounds fair,” Jane said. “I can tell you’ve been working really hard.”

It was very annoying that Darcy was a girl, because if she were male she’d be able to make a comment like “that’s not the only thing that’s hard.” Curse these anatomical limitations. 

As she approached the cash register to order, Darcy wasn’t certain whether she’d rather talk to the woman or not. On one hand, the last time she’d had to order coffee from the woman, it had been humiliating. She had entirely lost the ability to speak and wound up communicating through elaborate pointing, which wasn’t a particularly good way of conveying that you wanted it with no foam. 

On the other hand, if she ordered from the woman, she would get to hear her voice. And it was an astonishing voice, as perfect as the rest of her. Darcy was pretty sure that after God made that barista, he was like “welp, I can never again create a woman as perfect as this one, I’m going to retire and take up knitting” and ever after the devil had been in charge of creating humans, which explained why the world was so fucked up. But it was worth it. A single glance at the way her breasts jiggled proved that.

Add it to the list of reasons to order from her: more opportunities to watch those breasts jiggle. 

But Darcy didn’t get to make the decision: the woman was manning the cash register. “The usual?” she asked. 

Darcy eeped. She hoped that the woman realized this was a positive eep.

“I’m sorry about the foam last time,” the woman said. “I didn’t get your order precisely right.”

Oh no. She knew her order. She knew her order which means that she knew things about Darcy, she had probably asked about it, she had probably had at least one conversation about Darcy, she knew that Darcy existed, and this was all far too much information to process and Darcy was staring at the specials board looking like an idiot.

The specials board had a picture of a dinosaur on it. It was, apparently, a mocha cinnamasaurus.

“You need to pay,” the woman said, her voice full of aching gentleness. Darcy’s opinion on this matter was completely unaffected by the fact that the woman was the love of her life.

Darcy reached into her wallet and grabbed two bills without looking and shoved them at the woman. “Keep the change,” she said. Women liked someone who was generous, right? Right.

“I’m sorry, you’ve given me two dollar bills,” the woman said. 

Crap. The woman must think that Darcy was a complete idiot. She slunk back, took a five out of her wallet, and paid, silently wishing a hole in the earth would open up and swallow her whole. 

“I think she’s a spy,” Darcy said, returning to the table. 

“She can’t be a spy,” Jane said, “she’s working at a coffeeshop.”

“That’s her cover,” Darcy said. “She moves like a ninja.” And Darcy had spent enough time watching the way she moved to know that was true.

“Then she’s a martial artist,” Jane said. “Or a dancer.”

“She knew my order,” Darcy said.

“Because she works at the coffeeshop,” Jane said, “and we’re here every day for four hours while I try to get some math into your head.”

“Nope,” Darcy said, “it’s because she’s a spy, and she’s collecting information on everyone in this coffeehouse. She probably knows your shoe size. She probably knows Thor’s shoe size.”

“Neither I nor Thor is particularly interesting to national security,” Jane said.

“She’s just keeping in practice,” Darcy said. 

“All this seems like a bit of a reach.”

“Nah.” Darcy shook her head. “Spy. It’s the only possible explanation.”

The archer barista called her name. Darcy stood and walked over to collect her cappuccino. 

As she sat down, Darcy’s eyes focused on the name on her cup. It was not ‘Darcy’, nor was it any of the perversions of Darcy that coffeeshop employees enjoyed putting on her coffee cup, making Darcy wonder if they’d actually heard her name correctly the first time and were just doing it for their own amusement. 

“It says ‘stop overthinking it,’” she said. “What does that mean? Is she sending me some sort of message? Oh god! What do I do?”

“It means,” came a smooth voice from behind her, “you should stop thinking so much.”

Darcy turned. It was the barista. Oh god. Her voice was smooth and warm and dark, like hot chocolate poured into a cup, and Darcy didn’t know whether it was a soporific that wrapped her up and rocked her to sleep or a shot of electricity straight to her clit or both and she very much wanted to die. 

She was trying very hard to make eye contact, but the barista’s breasts were right there, and it was impossible, and she hoped that being a woman got her a pass on being a complete garbage straight guy. 

“I get off work in two hours,” the woman said, “I would very much like it if you would walk me home.”

Walk. Her home. Darcy was going to die, she was actually, literally, no exaggeration, going to die. 

Jane made a face. “You’re supposed to have another half-hour of studying after that,” she said. 

“Then I suggest you hurry,” the barista said. “Because after you walk me home… well, let’s just say that you might not want to come back.”

She was talking about sex, right? She was definitely talking about sex. Like, if you ask someone to walk you home, and then you say that they’re not going to want to come back, and then you don’t make any firm statements about how exciting your tropical fish are or anything, you definitely want to have sex with them. Darcy was going to get to have sex with the hot barista. She was going to get to kiss those dark red lips, and touch those perfect tits, and see what those leather pants looked like crumpled on the floor, and finger--

Darcy couldn’t even complete that thought. The surge of arousal going through her was too much. 

“I’m not sure how good Darcy is going to be at doing math in this condition,” Jane said, amused. 

“She better become good,” the barista said. “I would hate to interfere with someone’s studies. Maybe I’ll have to ask her a few questions to check that she really understood the material before I let her walk me home.”

Darcy had never been so motivated to study math in her life. 

“Oh?” Jane said. “You know calculus? Are you in STEM?”

“No, I actually study political science,” the barista said. “I’m just well-rounded.”

“Darcy here is a political scientist too,” Jane said. 

“I’m glad to see her studying mathematics so avidly, then,” the barista said. “So often people in the social sciences absolutely refuse to do STEM. It’s a real weakness in our field” She winked. Darcy felt like she was going to melt. “Back to work, but I am very much looking forward to seeing you later.”

“Um,” Darcy said. She was proud of her voice. It did a good job of making a noise. “What’s your name?”

“Natasha,” the woman said. “Natasha Romanov.”

Romanov, Darcy thought. Mrs. Darcy Romanov. It had a good ring to it. 

Natasha smiled, and Darcy realized that all her speculations about the wonder of Natasha’s smile were wrong, utterly wrong, as wrong as calling the Mona Lisa “a nice painting” or Shakespeare “an okay writer” or Thor’s abs “decent”. It was a religious experience. Darcy understood the connections between all living things, the true beauty and wonder underlying the world, the existence of a benevolent God. 

She permitted herself a full minute of watching Natasha’s ass wiggle as she walked back to the cash register. She was pretty sure Natasha was putting in some extra wiggle just because she knew Darcy was watching. Then she turned to Jane. “What did I tell you?” she said. “Spy.”

“Not everyone who overhears a conversation is a spy,” Jane said. 

Darcy pitied Jane for her lack of espionage knowledge. “Which one of us is the political scientist here again?” She pulled the textbook over and began to look at problem fourteen. 

Being a Bond Girl wasn’t going to be so bad after all.


End file.
